We had Liz over for dinner last night which was lovely. It meant that in the afternoon I went to Sainsbury's to buy ingredients for cooking. The weather yesterday afternoon was foul, torrential rain and a heavy thunder storm. The storm caused a brief power-cut (under a second long) at Sainsbury's which in turn caused all the tills to reboot. They took an inordinate amount of time to come back up. Some thoughts:

• If your sales depends on electronic points of sale such as these, put them all on UPSs.
• Upgrade the hardware so that they boot more quickly. The Windows 2000 (eugh!) boot screen took an age to clear as did the .bat script that ran at login. The EPOS software itself started very quickly when it was launched but the machines had caused a delay before that point.
• Don't use Windows, just don't.